Monthly Archives: July 2010

In my own mind, if Fantasy authors were arranged into one massive over-simplified family tree, it would feature two great dynasties: Tolkien and Peake. Under Tolkien, people like Eddings and Donaldson, under Peake, writers like Clive Barker, China Mieville, maybe even a dash of Neil Gaiman, with people like Lovecraft a distant uncle or second [...]

In the past 24 hours I've seen my creative mood swing from feeling very positive to extremely critical. There's been no trigger either that I can see. It sucks, because I need to get the novel done, and things like this get in the way. But in my slump, I decided that I really need [...]

I don't expect this to prove to be universally true, but for me, Predator is the perfectly paced movie. The story has a rhythm to it that means I can pretty much watch that movie on a continuous loop (and have done so in the past). After action movies of the 80s where Arnie would [...]

In my years running the website I had the pleasure of running into loads of different fandoms. From Harry Potter and Marvel fans (boy, do you never want to get in a row with those guys!) ruight through to smaller niche fandoms like Jurassic Park and Power Rangers. In general I love fandoms (yes, including [...]

"In fact, I will go as far as to send you on this adventure. Very amusing for me, very good for you - and profitable too, very likely, if you ever get over it" - Gandalf, The Hobbit Writing can be a very solitary business, and one where it's easy to get yourself in a [...]

We have a phrase in Geocaching that goes "it's not about the numbers". This means that it shouldn't matter whether you've found a hundred or only one cache today, but instead whether you went for a nice walk or got taken somewhere interesting. And I think this should apply to reading as well. If you [...]

Everyone these days talks about needing to be connected to the internet but I think I've gone the other way. Last night I had a nasty outage with my ISP which meant my internet connection effectively went down, and I was surprised how much it didn't bother me. Don't get me wrong: email, web access, [...]

It was Douglas Adams who said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Unfortunately, deadlines are a necessity in publishing, and as a writer, you won't get far these days unless you can meet them. So, whilst it's only a personal one, I have a deadline for this [...]

The last few days have not been good days for writing. A headachey illness has kept me off work a couple of days, and before that was my camping trip. So I've done hardly any writing over the last week. However one major stumbling block I've been trying to work my way around is a [...]